Would You Buy Abraham Lincoln's Sweater?

Many believe that people leave their immaterial essences on objects they owned

How much would someone pay for a pair of underwear worn by Justin Bieber? By Abraham Lincoln? Miley Cyrus? Eleanor Roosevelt? Science has finally provided an answer, which is: It depends.

In 1946, the sociologist Erwin Ackerknecht expressed a view still common today when he wrote that Western culture is unique for its "outlawing of the irrational." But not so fast. According to a 2013 Harris Poll, 42% of Americans believe in the existence of ghosts, 36% in UFOs and 26% in witches. Rumors of the demise of irrationality are exaggerated; we're mired in magical thinking.

Recent research shows a great example of this: namely, magical contagion, a belief that people have an immaterial essence that can be transferred through objects. I'm certainly susceptible to this sort of belief myself—I'd love to try making my way through "Für Elise" on a piano once owned by Beethoven.

The Yale psychologists George Newman and Paul Bloom studied such magical contagion and published their findings this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They focused on a lightning rod of magical contagion: the possessions of celebrities, namely, the estate auctions of John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Bernard and Ruth Madoff. Each auction house had generated preauction estimates of what each item would go for, so it was possible to compare the estimates with actual prices. Drs. Newman and Bloom categorized each item by how much physical contact the owner was likely to have had with it: low contact for items like artwork, medium for items such as furniture, and high for items such as clothing.

ENLARGE

Did JFK and Marilyn Monroe leave their immaterial essences on objects they owned?
Getty Images

Their findings? For well-liked celebrities (JFK and Marilyn), high-contact items were sold for more than predicted; for a disliked individual (Mr. Madoff), high contact meant a lower price. In contrast, prices for medium- and low-contact items turned out to be right where the auctioneers predicted. What about the high-contact possessions of Ruth Madoff, whose role in the Madoff disaster is viewed by most as ambiguous? Neither inflation nor deflation of price.

Drs. Newman and Bloom then homed in on the contagion element. Volunteers were asked how much they would pay for a sweater worn by JFK or Mr. Madoff—either as is or after it had been sterilized. Sterilizing JFK's sweater decreased its value. Sterilizing Madoff's sweater increased its value. Now I consider myself a pretty rational guy, but that last finding resonates even with me—I'd feel uneasy about catching some of Bernie Madoff's moral-taint cooties from his sweater.

Research like this will help auction houses when they negotiate someday with the estate of, say, Mel Gibson. But our tendency to believe in a nonmaterial personal essence comes through in another, more important realm. In work published in 2012 in the journal Cognition, Dr. Bloom and colleagues examined magical thinking about genetics.

Participants were told of a person who has done great harm to people. Decades later, the question arises whether this person's two grandchildren—one biological, the other adopted at birth, both raised identically—are morally obliged to help the victims' grandchildren. People thought that the biological descendant was more obliged.

Other subjects were told about a quandary: A crime has occurred, and the police have two suspects but can't figure out which one did it. People were more willing to have both suspects incarcerated if they were identical twins separated at birth than if they were unrelated look-alikes. In their minds, the innocent man somehow shared more of a moral stain with the criminal if the two had a shared bloodline. The shared genes of the suspects somehow implicated both of them—but genes don't work this way.

Magical thinking still lives in our Westernized world—so be on guard for its temptations when considering ghosts and sweaters, or UFOs and genes.

Mr. Quinn, yours is reductive reasoning. Stars like Marilyn Monroe have become patron saints for the mentally afflicted. So, if someone feels for her, appreciates her work or shares similar pain, how is that SUPERFICIAL?

Magical thinking is the only method taught in most of our university economics departments.

Some people think that magical thinking is the way that Democrats and socialists come up with their utopian social-improvement projects. But that is incorrect. The masterminds who create these ideas are completely cynical and realistic about the true, corrupt purposes of their schemes; the bed-wetting "useful idiots" (see Whole-Foods shopper) believe the magical thinking propaganda in which those schemes are disguised.

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